Friday, September 30, 2016
... /////

It's not certain at all that next Tuesday, the Nobel prize in physics will be given to the people associated with LIGO, the (double) L-shaped experiment that announced the detection of Einstein's gravitational waves in February 2016. Recall that the waves were actually detected on September 14th, 2015, a year ago, just four months after an interview where someone said that the detection would take place "within five years". Sometimes things are slower than expected but indeed, sometimes they are faster, too.

Despite the uncertainty about the 2016 Nobel, the LIGO possibility is reasonably likely by now. Rumors indicate that the January 31st deadline for the nominations didn't turn out to be a fatal obstacle for the LIGO-related candidates.

In February, I was afraid that there could be some politically correct folks who would want to reward the current leaders of the experiment – basically random politically chosen hires. But thankfully or hopefully, it seems that the probability of this scenario has decreased and the actual fathers of the LIGO success – which made the decisive steps decades ago – are more likely to win.

Unless something unexpected happens – and I pray that it will – the first batch of 50,000 of Czech businesses, mainly restaurants and hotels etc., will be obliged to immediately report every single payment from a consumer to the ministry of finance led by the Slovak-born food industry billionaire, media mogul, a VIP ex-member of the communist party, and a former communist snitch Andrej Babiš (net worth over $3 billion).

The consumer gets a receipt and he or she – an amateur snitch – will be able to send the receipt's ID to a server of the ministry and verify that the payment has been reported by the business. A motivation is that he may win a lottery for the amateur snitches. Andrej Babiš's former career of a snitch is seen in every aspect of this sick system. If the payment hasn't been reported, the businessman will immediately face existentially threatening fines and other punishments that the minister himself may decide about – or forgive. The law defining the EET things is a classic "rubber law" that may be bent by the executive power. It's a similar kind of a law that made Adolf Hitler the Führer.

This system is meant to guarantee that the taxes from that payment – every payment – will be sent to the government. Andrej Babiš, a member of the very bottom of the Czechoslovak moral cesspool who would have been executed in late 1989 if we hadn't decided to make our revolution in the "velvet" way (for example, their dirty family disinherited a relative who "dared to emigrate" from the communist Czechoslovakia, to emphasize how deeply into the communist leaders' aßes they are willing to climb in order to keep their undeserved advantages), and a guy who already owns most of the largest newspapers, will have access to all the information about every single cash payment to every business on the territory of Czechia, at least after all businesses are included into the system in a coming year or so.

Thursday, September 29, 2016
... /////

The British Empire has been in charge of the British India for some time. In 1947, that territory declared their independence and new countries, Pakistan and India, were created. Pakistan is some 98% Islamic. India is mostly Hinduist (Buddhism is below 1% these days) and only 15% Islamist (Christianity is over 2%, the third largest religion there). However, you may see that India is still the by far more diverse country among the two.

I would surely say that India is the more "politically Western" country among the two. You could say that it's "ironic" given the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Western suit and "Aryan" skin color on the picture above with the visually darker and more folklore-dressed Indian prime minister Modi. But India's fights against the Islamic terrorists basically coincide with the logic of similar fights that sensible Western countries have to wage.

There have been three conflicts between India and Pakistan. Most of the conflicts are linked to the most disputed part of the border, inside Kashmir. Kashmir is a territory in the Northern part of the Pakistani-Indian border, a cool region adjacent to the Himalayas. Both countries claim all of it. In practice, it's divided to two similarly large parts by the de facto (but internationally unrecognized) border, the so-called "Line of Control" (LoC). That's where the newest tension is concentrated, too.

Along with Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever, Rainer Weiss is one of the most likely "triplet" that can share the Nobel prize in physics next Tuesday. Weiss' key contribution already occurred in 1967 – see the history of LIGO – when he began to construct a laser interferometer and published a text pointing out its usefulness.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016
... /////

Today in the morning, my smartphone beeped and informed me about the reports that "an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet, namely 92 percent, is living at places where the air pollution surpasses the limits defined by the World Health Organization".

Tuesday, September 27, 2016
... /////

at Hofstra University, New York. Lester Holt was the moderator. The host had the full control over the questions, the audience – partly students – was expected to remain silent and not to use cameras and phones.

Hillary said "Hey Donald!" and he shook her hand, apparently confident in his immunity against pneumonia and other contagious diseases. Quite generally, I am sure it's right to say that they behaved in a much more friendly way towards each other than their voters. ;-) Concerning similar formalities and speaking strategies, Trump was attempting to interrupt Hillary more than 20 times but only succeeded once. She didn't try to interrupt him, with three failed exceptions.

Sunday, September 25, 2016
... /////

I just listened to a rant by Samantha Power, the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Well, what a hateful woman – when it comes to anything that has a relationship with Russia. She has nothing to do with the America that we used to love and that was inspiring us. One of the reasons I would love Trump to win is that he could end this absolutely insane anti-Russian hysteria in the U.S. Among other things, he could help to fire this particular insufferable female talking head.

But it's not just Samantha Power. Boris Johnson talks about Russian war crimes in Syria while The Telegraph shocks us with the Aleppo horror. From that paper, you may learn what has actually happened.

In a hugely intense bombing of the anti-Assad forces in Aleppo, an operation masterminded by the Kremlin and Assad, "dozens" of civilians have been killed. That's sad. (Media close to the Kremlin dispute even these dozens of death but let me assume that these sad reports are true.) But is that unexpected? Is that a lot?

He wants to grab a piece of land outside the EU – most specifically, he mentioned a place in Libya – and build a large enough camp that should host a really, really large number of migrants or self-described refugees. I chose the term "Hong Kong" because there could be a million people over there; the terms "Liberland" or "Dachau" look too small for Orbán's project.

Note that Hong Kong was liberated from the Japanese overlords in 1945 by a combination of Chinese and British troops. The latter players were enough to bring the place under the British control which meant a huge economic advantage. As previously negotiated, Hong Kong returned under the control of the People's Republic of China in 1997. So far, they haven't destroyed the place – because at least in the economic sense, the mainland China has largely embraced capitalism by itself.

Every five years or so (see 2007 and 2011), I write a blog post about the 13rd zodiac sign, the Serpentarius (the Greek name Ophiuchus is preferred by many these days but not by me) – the wearer of the snakes – in which I was born, much like everyone whose birthday is between November 29th and December 17th or so (more dates).

The Paris agreement is a recent meaningless remake of the 1997 meaningless Kyoto treaty that, like the predecessor, tries to "fight against the climate change". Err once, err twice...

If you remember the Kyoto treaty, Al Gore signed it but the U.S. has never ratified it, and neither has Australia. Canada later withdrew from that pact. I think that the impact of this absence of the U.S. on the production of carbon dioxide – let alone the climate – was non-existent. In fact, the U.S. saw a greater decrease of "CO2 produced per dollar or capita" than the average Kyoto signatory. But because the U.S. stayed out, the American climate alarmists couldn't show their muscles as aggressively as their European counterparts.

Even though conservative Americans love to imagine that their nation is always more conservative than the European nations, I think that it doesn't apply to the current U.S. administration that is more left-wing than most European governments. This has many manifestations but one of them concerns the climate hysteria.

Friday, September 23, 2016
... /////

A week ago, Roger Penrose released his new book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy. We already knew that he was writing a book of this name in 2009 and Penrose was actually giving lectures with this name in 2006 or earlier. So you may say that this book is something that Roger Penrose – and he's far from an average man – has been working on for something like one decade. Also, the book has almost 200 figures which are freely available.

I wrote the clearest description of the book that is now out in 2014. Is the demand for this product of a decade-long effort by a famous thinker appropriate? Before we turn to this question, let me remind you about the content of the book or the meaning of the words in the title.

The three words, fashion, faith, and fantasy, primarily refer to string theory, quantum mechanics, and inflation, respectively. Roger Penrose has some problems with all these three things – and others. So he invents slogans to dismiss all these three important theories. String theory is a bubble, quantum mechanics is a religious cult, and inflationary cosmology is a result of folks on drugs who see pink elephants around. (Penrose's explanations are less concise and less colorful than mine, he's no Motl.)

As I have discussed in previous blog posts, his negative opinions on all these three theories are fundamentally wrong.

Li, Maxin, and Nanopoulous point out. It's great news that the would-be \(750\GeV\) particle has been liquidated. They revisited the predictions of their class of F-theory-based, grand unified, no-scale models and found some consequences that they surprisingly couldn't have told us about in the previous 10 papers and that we should be happy about, anyway.

We could have seen another example just five hours ago when Al Jazeera, a hybrid of written Mohammedanism and modern Western left-wing brainwashing outlets, picked a particular target, the Czech gambling industry:

The author, an American living in Burma ($5,000 is the GDP per capita, PPP), described Czechia as a decaying society where 110,000 gamblers (over 1%) should probably be stored in a psychiatric asylum. (The number 110,000 was picked from some random government documents and compared with numbers from other governments – which obviously use completely different methods so he was comparing apples with oranges.)

He admitted that these industries were overregulated during communism (which doesn't mean that gambling was absent: the totto-lotto ["Sportka" existed during socialism] and betting on sports was alive and reasonably well ["Sazka" was the large company that did this business already during socialism], while avoiding the efficiency of capitalism) but he described the results of freedom in this business as catastrophic.

Slot machines, quizomats – machines that test the encyclopedic knowledge or IQ, betting on sports, and other things were all included in his picture of the Armageddon.

There are various people in the Europe – and even in Czechia – who have endorsed Hillary Clinton for the U.S. president. Well, even though the late Václav Havel could be one of these people if he were around, the Czech presidents who are alive beg to differ.

President Emeritus Václav Klaus believes (and so do his aides) that Hillary's reign would be a continuation of the ongoing tragic drift towards the PC post-democracy. He thinks that Trump is a natural political animal who is currently playing the role of a campaigner and who will behave differently, more responsibly, once he sits in the White House. However, Klaus often says that "unfortunately, Hillary will probably win".

Well, I actually think that Trump's victory is more likely.

Today, the current Czech president Miloš Zeman, the founder of the modern social democracy in Czechia, was interviewed by iDNES TV and its boss Jaroslav Plesl, a journalist owned by the billionaire Andrej Babiš.

The first half of the 15-minute interview is dedicated to the Czech regional elections (in October 2016), the Czech economy, budget deficits etc. The elections are less important than the parliamentary elections. Those things are totally boring for 98% of TRF voters. Let me jump to the foreign policy questions.

Monday, September 19, 2016
... /////

While only a few thousand people in the world – about one part per million – have some decent idea about what string theory is, the term "string theory" has undoubtedly penetrated the mass culture. The technical name of the theory of everything is being used to promote concerts, "string theory" is used in the title of books about tennis, and visual arts have lots of "string theory" in them, too.

But the penetration is so deep that even the self-evidently marginal figures such as the anti-string crackpots have inspired some followers in totally different parts of the human activity. In particular, five days ago, a man named Paul Romer wrote a 26-page-long rant named

If you think that the title is surprisingly similar to the title of a book against physics, "The Trouble With Physics", well, you are right. It's no coincidence. Building on the example of the notorious anti-physics jihadist named Lee Smolin, Paul Romer attacks most of macroeconomics and what it's been doing since the 1970s.

Saturday, September 17, 2016
... /////

Most of the time, Hillary Clinton isn't working too hard to help the Trump campaign. In fact, sometimes it looks like she wants to harm Trump and maybe even return to the White House by the front entrance. But she has made an exception when she finally picked the anthem for the Trump campaign.

I had to listen to the song twice in order for me to find the melody catchy and thrice to almost safely remember it.

The anthem is a key music from "Les Deplorables" and it is called "When the Beating of Your Heart Echoes the Beating of the Drumpfs".

Friday, September 16, 2016
... /////

Just like the Czech ex-president has said that the Left has definitively won the war against the Right for any foreseeable future, I think it's true that the haters of modern theoretical physics have definitively won the war for the newspapers and the bulk of the information sources.

The Quanta Magazine is funded by the Simons Foundation. Among the owners of the media addressing non-experts, Jim Simons is as close to the high-energy theoretical physics research community as you can get. But the journalists are independent etc. and the atmosphere among the physics writers is bad so no one could prevent the creation of an unfortunate text

by Ms K.C. Cole. The text is a mixed, and I would say mostly negative, package of various sentiments concerning the state of string theory. Using various words, the report about an alleged "failure of string theory" is repeated about 30 times in that article. It has become nearly mandatory for journalists to write this spectacular lie to basically every new popular text about string theory. Only journalists who have some morality avoid this lie – and there aren't too many.

A summit about the EU future takes place in the Slovak capital today. The location was determined by the ongoing Slovak EU presidency. Because they should focus on a "more distant" future, the British leaders will be absent for the first time. That's why the discussions on Brexit won't take place – or may turn out to be inconsequential.

Nominal EU President Donald Tusk urges a brutally honest assessment while the BBC is certain that the meeting will be a waste of time. Well, I also guess that they won't solve anything meaningfully but I still think that a meeting organized by the Slovak government has greater chances than those in Brussels and elsewhere. The Visegrád Group may present some reform plan for the EU (a "cultural counterrevolution") – a plan trying to make the EU less integrated, among other things. We will see whether a unified V4 voice exists and has a chance to be heard. Czech PM Sobotka would like to focus the summit on the "fight against illegal immigration and terrorism".

The Slovak presidential palace

In the morning, delegations arrive to the Bratislava Castle. The folks should talk for some two or three hours over there. The Slovak government insisted on a different arrangement than the talks in Brussels usually have; that includes some small rooms for discussions of couples or small groups. I surely think it's a good idea for the Slovaks – and other individual organizers – to bring some of their own approach. They also emphasize that the participants will be served proper Slovak wine instead of some French plonk. :-)

Thursday, September 15, 2016
... /////

I want to add a playful "research" twist to my explanations of the foundations of quantum mechanics.

In many blog posts, I argued that the need to express the facts about Nature relatively to an observer – the "subjective" character of knowledge – is a defining property of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the only known consistent framework that makes it impossible to assume (like classical physics did) that all observations may be derived as consequences of some shared objective data (data independent of an observer). This property of quantum mechanics will be referred to as its observer dependence.

However, most recently 2 weeks ago, I also argued that all novelties of quantum mechanics may be reduced to the nonzero commutators. After all, Planck's constant \(\hbar\) is the constant that is approximated by \(\hbar=0\) in classical physics (or the classical limits of quantum theory) which means that it quantifies the deviations from classical physics. At the same moment, all commutators of observables that exist classically as well as quantum mechanically are proportional to \(\hbar\) in the quantum theory. The nonzero commutators are equivalent to what we will call noncommutativity of quantum mechanics.

OK, these seem like two different "defining" principles of quantum mechanics. Which of them is right? Needless to say, you may say that both principles are right and must be embraced to construct the correct framework. However, I will try to defend a prettier statement. These two principles aren't really independent. To some extent, they are equivalent!

Between 2007 and 2012, Sarkozy was the president of France and we could often see him as a member of a powerful European couple along with Angela Merkel. I think that during Sarkozy's times, France was viewed as a more important part of the couple than it is now. The effect of a switch to Sarkozy seems self-evident – although some unspectacular evolution of the French economy relatively to the German one could have contributed, too.

His fresh statements to AFP make it clear that he is no lukewarmer.

Climate has been changing for four billion years. Sahara has become a desert, it isn’t because of industry. You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.

Yup, if you are as non-arrogant as women are :-), except for Catherine Hayhoe or the Latin American female crackpot on top of the UNFCCC whose name I have forgotten (update: something like Figueres), you know that global warming is a pile of šit.

He seems to be as skeptical as you or me. The climate has been changing for quite some time. And desertification of Sahara – which, by the way, I also consider a vastly bigger issue than the change of the global temperature by a degree – wasn't caused by men.

Welcome to the Prague Café. Today, we have moved the program to slightly atypical spaces, namely those of the Institute of Václav Klaus. The reason is simple. Our guest today is the former president Václav Klaus. Good afternoon.

Klaus:

Good afternoon. Well, I just hope that you haven't brought the spirit of the Prague Café [=PC intellectual elites of Prague] into these sacred spaces of our institute.

As explained 893 times on this blog, quantum mechanics has replaced, refused, and retired a basic assumption of classical physics, realism, while it has kept the principles of relativity, the Lorentz invariance, and the locality that follows from them.

So we have theories of nearly everything – quantum field theories – and a likely theory of everything – string theory – that predict that the behavior of physics objects in the Minkowski space is perfectly local and Lorentz-invariant but the required correct description cannot be realist. Instead, quantum mechanics is a set of laws of Nature that must be applied on a set of intrinsically subjective observations by an observer – and the precise description of a process generally does depend on whom we consider an observer and what are his observations, on answers that must be given and "inserted" to the quantum mechanical black box before the final calculations of quantum mechanics are made.

Quantum mechanics has been disputed by folks like Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrödinger from the beginning. However, the particular set of facts in the previous two paragraphs began to be obfuscated with the works of John Bell who proved a correct theorem – but started to draw completely incorrect consequences out of it and encouraged many other people to do the same.

The theorem shows that "local realist theories" cannot agree with the observations because those sometimes show greater correlations than the correlations obeying Bell's inequalities, an inevitable consequence of "local realist theories". So far so good. But Bell incorrectly suggested – and many mindless, totally deluded people repeated – that the resolution is that the world is realist but non-local.

I thought that because of my Soviet bloc background, years at Harvard, and many years I dedicated to this issue, I knew a lot about the PC, its history, its genesis etc. So I couldn't learn anything really new, right? Today, I was led to the four-months-old talk by

Tuesday, September 13, 2016
... /////

I do remember the year 2000. One of the games that accompanied the Gore-Bush presidential elections was the swapping of the votes between different leftists. A Ralph Nader voter in a swing state was viewed as damaging for Gore. So a Gore voter in a different state found him, promised to vote for Nader instead, and the Nader fan had the duty to vote for Gore, after all.

In that way, Gore was supposed to win the swing states where every vote mattered. On the other hand, Nader got the same number of votes in the whole U.S. You may remember that these groups of leftists ultimately didn't succeed, Gore lost, and Nader became pretty much irrelevant, too. But could they have succeeded? Hasn't the vote-swapping worked in the opposite direction than they intended?

Scott Aaronson celebrates this "wonderful" idea in 2016, too. Gore has been replaced by Hillary and Nader has been replaced by candidates such as Jill Stein.

People like Aaronson are bigots and technologists of power. They don't discuss politics, their understanding of the political questions – especially subtle ones – is extremely superficial. But they want to be disciplined servants of their extreme left-wing ideology and invent the right methods to make this ideology conquer the world.

Once people like Aaronson take over a country, they become secretaries responsible for the logistics – deciding e.g. how to get the deplorables to a Gulag with a limited number of buses etc.

Monday, September 12, 2016
... /////

Hillary fainted during an event commemorating the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 Muslim attacks on America (and my PhD defense). Soon afterwards, her doctor revealed that she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. It's my feeling that the doctor had been asked to remain silent and she did something that the Hillary campaign didn't want.

For the first time, Hillary's health was acknowledged to be a serious issue. Her two-day trip to California was cancelled. And the leaders of the Democratic National Council have called for an emergency meeting that is already considering – right now – Hillary's replacement. The replacement hypothetically could be Sanders but probably won't be. Biden and Mooch (whoever the latter is supposed to be) are mentioned as serious contenders; Monica Lewinski is the most frequently mentioned replacement for Hillary among the pranksters.

She hasn't been replaced yet. But especially in combination with some previous pronouncements and events, the recent events are disturbing for numerous reasons.

I was listening to some young Czech musicians' remakes of various songs.

One of the singing girls who impressed me as musicians was Naty [Natalia] Hrychová, with her three-year-old The Fifth (Pátá, a remake of Downtown – it sounds similar; the title means "Five O'Clock" and the song is about the moment when classes are finally over), created to match the key and rhythm of the same song by Zuzana Norisová from The Rebels, a retro-movie (yes, the actors star as much younger students). Naty attended a rural basic school in a village or town I've never heard of.

So I accidentally looked at her newer songs. And two weeks ago, she posted "My Mathematics" song two weeks ago – it has over 320,000 views (and over 1700 comments) by now.

I didn't instantly fall in love with the song (it got much better after a month!) but the lyrics is all about mathematics. More importantly, I want to convey the observation that despite all the pro-EU and climate-change and other politically correct brainwashing, often sponsored by the bureaucrats in the EU, certain things such as feminism haven't crippled the Czech schools yet.

Sunday, September 11, 2016
... /////

A gang of teenagers in Toulon, the French riviera, has attacked and broken the nose and similar facial bones of two men who accompanied women in shorts – because, according to the gang, the women in shorts were "whores". The gangsters must have failed to notice that there are millions of women in shorts on the French riviera.

Well, this gang almost certainly consisted of boys educated in an uncivilized society following the rules of the Middle Ages so you can't be surprised too much. When such folks get the space to terrorize the public for such crazy reasons – such as wearing the shorts – they will do so.

But don't we have similar mob attacks in the West? Well, we do. They often lead to different outcomes than broken noses but the mob mentality and irrationality are completely analogous to those of the Toulon attackers.

Mother Teresa (1910-1997) has been awarded sainthood by the appropriate Catholic apparatchiks. Just a decade ago, I would agree that she was one of the holiest people in the 20th century and so on. You can hear this statement everywhere so it must probably be true – like the statement that the Greenland is the world's largest island. Now, my opinions are closer to those of Florin M.

This episode of "Penn and Teller's Bullšit" – well, the video only shows 1/3 of an episode that focused on Mother Teresa – was an eye-opener for me when I watched it some 6 years ago. Christopher Hitchens was their most favorite "critic" and he is the #1 source for Florin, too.

Friday, September 09, 2016
... /////

Yesterday, our glorious confederate EU leaders have decided to kickstart the greatest "humanitarian" gesture in the EU history, in their efforts to at least infinitesimally please their new great friend Erdogan.

All the illegals who are currently in Turkey and plan to continue their illegal trip to the EU have been donated free debit cards with €0.348 billion on them. The money should make it easier for them to buy boats, get to Greece or Turkey, or take a flight to Western Europe, and neutralize some cops or other Europeans who would dare to try to enforce the law.

Fighters in Daesh were given gift cards to stay in any EU hotel of their choice and those who have already murdered some infidels have received life-long permits valid in all EU brothels including the headquarters of the European Commission. OK, I made the previous sentence up but even the second paragraph is just stunning. The EU has officially turned into one of the most generous sponsors of terrorism in the world.

Meanwhile, provocative writer Éric Zemmour – whose parents were Algerian Jews – has been interviewed by RTL, a French TV. This interview optimistically suggests that the freedom of expression isn't dead in France yet. I guess that such an interview couldn't appear at the most influential German TV stations anymore.

Cathy O'Neill has worked as a scholar at Columbia before she became a "quant" for D.E. Shaw in Fall 2007, making sure that the company, the financial system, and the derivatives in particular would work flawlessly in the following year.

With these achievements, she is back with a book, willing to share her wisdom. I won't link to particular reviews and interviews because I don't think that there are innovative ideas in individual articles in that group. Instead, see e.g. Google News and Google.

Thursday, September 08, 2016
... /////

After several years, I watched the full Apple product event last night. I was impressed by the technological achievements but the show hasn't made me "dream" about the new iPhone 7 or Apple Watch 2 etc.

Let me start with a review of the event. Before Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, arrived, we saw a funny exchange he had with the taxi driver. It looked like a video that was filmed just before Cook entered the hall in San Francisco.

Cook and various people were giving their talks. A billion of iPhones have been sold, that's why they are everywhere. Super Mario (Run) has finally been brought to iPhones. The game's father, my uncle Šigeru Mija-Motl, presented the new game in half-English, half-Japanese.

Other people were telling us about the projects to teach kids how to code (in Swift) using an iPad app or what was that. Another woman showed that Apple's counterpart of the Microsoft Office will now enable the real-time collaboration of many users that create a presentation or another file. Apple Watch 2 was waterproof, GPS-enhanced, and a hike enhanced by the product was sketched. Apple Watch Nike Plus could be useful for runners, a Nike guy argued.

This watch will tease the owners – it's sunny outside or Sunday and you really need to go running, Joe is ahead of you etc. – a reason why I surely won't buy such an annoying, arrogant watch. ;-)

Wednesday, September 07, 2016
... /////

The plans to build the world's new greatest collider in China have many prominent supporters – including Shing-Tung Yau, Nima Arkani-Hamed, David Gross, Edward Witten – but SixthTone and South China Morning Post just informed us about a very prominent foe: Chen-Ning Yang, the more famous part of Lee-Yang and Yang-Mills.

He is about 94 years old now but his brain is very active and his influence may even be enough to kill the project(s).

The criticism is mainly framed as a criticism of CEPC (Circular Electron-Positron Collider), a 50-70-kilometer-long [by circumference] lepton accelerator. But I guess that if the relevant people decided to build another hadron machine in China, and recall that SPPC (Super Proton-Proton Collider) is supposed to be located in the same tunnel, his criticism would be about the same. In other words, Yang is against all big Chinese colliders. If you have time, read these 403 pages on the CEPC-SPPC project. Yang may arguably make all this work futile by spitting a few milliliters of saliva.

The previous text on this topic of the Czech currency cap was posted on July 26th.

So far, I am largely unprepared for the change (also owning several stock funds denominated in other currencies, without any insurance of the Forex risks) but wealthy and money-savvy TRF readers may do better. As Reuters reported yesterday, the shorting of the EUR-CZK currency pair may be the currency trade of 2017, according to ING (and surely others).

Except that once all the people become familiar with the opportunity, events may speed up and the change may already materialize in 2016.

For an older example of the same idea, the separation of the Czech and Slovak currencies in early 1993 was also accelerated once the Slovaks began to realize that their Slovak savings may deteriorate in the case of the currency split, and that's why they moved the cash to the Czech banks and Slovak banks were running out of cash, thus forcing to do the split quickly. Czechoslovakia was only split on January 1st and the plan was to keep the currency union except that the aforementioned pressures from the self-fulfilling prophesy forced the folks to (flawlessly) separate the currencies already on February 8th, just some 37 days later.

Czechoslovaks and especially Czechs have been highly conservative with their currencies and savings. The conservativeness has many implications. Unlike other post-communist countries, we have always used primarily our currency for trading, saving, loans etc. Also, the inflation rate and personal and public debt level were much lower than in Hungary but even in less extreme former communist countries.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016
... /////

A Muslim calling himself "the U.N. high commissioner for human rights" has prepared a rant against the Western politicians who oppose the Islamization of Europe and North America. He gave the speech at the Hague yesterday.

A full transcript is available and will appear below, too. Let me respond to that diatribe.

Dear Friends, I wish to address this short statement to Mr Geert Wilders, his acolytes, indeed to all those like him – the populists, demagogues and political fantasists.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch lawmaker with no executive power right now, even though his Party for Freedom has a significant chance to win the next elections in 2017. It is weird for a U.N. official to single out an innocent Dutch citizen as a target of his personal attacks. Should we understand it as a new U.N. policy to bully innocent yet politically inconvenient individuals in Europe?

Perhaps, the fact that the speech was given at the Hague is supposed to be an explanation why the U.N. official targeted a Dutch politician and tried to intervene into the internal Dutch domestic affairs. However, the U.N. official should only see the Hague as a neutral place that hosts some of the international organizations similar to the organizations that employs the official himself. This location doesn't give him the moral right to intervene into the Dutch domestic political affairs.

The Dutch internal politics is not your business, Mr Hussein, just like the internal politics of Kuwait was not the business of your Iraqi namesake. You may object that there is a difference because Saddam has already been executed while you are still walking and talking. But the difference between the two of you could be just 10 years.

Europhysics News is a journal published by the European Physical Society. It sounds like a probable counterpart of the American Physical Society. Well, I have some problems with this organization, APS, but I still believe that their physics journal wouldn't publish what the EPS physics journal did.

Monday, September 05, 2016
... /////

Thank God, my homeland hasn't been fully occupied by Merkel's Germany yet which is why my compatriots may write and read what is happening in the world, including Germany, and – among other things – how their government has f*cked up the energy industry.

(The word Energiewende means something like The Energy Breakthrough – I guess this is how it would be called in the U.S.)

Germans are boasting about their path towards a green energy industry. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs have been created. However, the bill is being paid by the German households that have to face the electricity prices higher by 40%.

Sunday, September 04, 2016
... /////

Pomerania itself is a region belonging to Germany and Poland these days; the name "Pomerania" (PL: Pomorze, CZ: Pomořany) approximately means "Area By the Sea" in Slavic languages. The equally named 7th century West Slavic tribe of Pomeranians has modern descendants in Poland, the Kashubians. Most of the Bundesland is Mecklenburg in the West, a historical land speaking Low German (Mecklenburg is a distorted Mikilenburg, a big castle; it was Veligrad in old Slavic languages and it is Megalopolis in modern Latin). Their union is the poorest Bundesland in Germany. It probably harbors the smallest number of Muslims as well – but the Bundesland is among those that understand that a big Muslim community is a problem.

On August 24th, Czech ex-president Václav Klaus visited Schwerin, the capital of this Bundesland, and gave a speech (DE) to support the Alternative für Deutschland. I think it's fortunate that not many Czechs are reading these things because they would probably be easy targets of parodies.

If I add just a little bit of the parody flavor, he said that he had really, really never visited the part of DDR North of Berlin before. Why would I be visiting such a boring flat place without mountains? How could I enjoy right-wing sports such as skiing over here? Or should I swim in your cold Baltic Sea? Funnily enough, as a kid, with my family, I have spent a week in the Rügen Island (CZ: ostrov Rujána). It was fun. Cold hardy right-wing boys such as your humble correspondent don't have a problem to swim in cold water. I've tried an Austrian lake close to 10 °C, too. ;-)

Saturday, September 03, 2016
... /////

The main topic of my term paper in a 1998 Rutgers Glennys Farrar course was the question "Are neutrinos Majorana or Dirac?". I found the neutrino oscillations more important which is why I internalized that topic more deeply – although it was supposed to be reserved by a classmate of mine (and for some Canadian and Japanese guys who got a recent Nobel prize for the experiments). At any rate, the question I was assigned may be experimentally answered soon. Or not. (You may also want to see a similarly old term paper on the Milky Way at the galactic center.)

Neutrinos are spin-1/2 fermions. Their masses may arise just like the masses of electrons or positrons. In that case, we need a full Dirac spinor, two 2-component spinors, distinct particles and antiparticles (neutrinos and antineutrinos), and everything about the mass works just like in the case of the electrons and positrons. The Dirac mass terms are schematically\[

\] If neutrinos were Dirac particles in this sense, it would mean that right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos do exist, after all – just like the observed left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antineutrinos. They would just be decoupled i.e. hard to be created.

I was asked to promote an article about Clexit (climate exit) at Breitbart. Well, I don't see how a website like mine could be effectively helping to increase the traffic at Breitbart that has far more visitors. It feels like the repetitive e-mails I am receiving from Donald Trump saying that he needs my money. Doesn't he have enough of his money and wouldn't it be more natural for him to send some money to me? ;-)

But as you can see, I did my best, included a hyperlink, and wrote a controversial description that will make some reader click at it. :-)

Orange countries are the current self-described "ratified signatories" of the Paris agreement.

Also, even though I am subscribed under Clexit, I don't see how the article by our "founding secretary of Clexit" exceeds or differs from thousands of other review articles about the climate issue that have been written in the last decade or two, except for his somewhat ludicrous title. Well, some of them were much deeper than this one. So apologies but with my lack of faith that this article makes any difference, I will probably not be an effective servant of the "founding secretary". For his age, his behavior looks childish to me.

Signs of any progress in physics through the experiment are being carefully stopped by Mother Nature. She is telling everyone: Stop with these ludicrous experiments and start to work on string theory seriously. ;-) What other anomalies get killed these days?

you could have learned about some tentative astronomical observations of X-rays with energy \(3.5\keV\), sometimes attributed to a \(7\keV\) sterile neutrino dark matter or something else that was equally new.

If I ignore his war against the small entrepreneurs and his self-evident conflicts of interest, I think that the Slovak-born food industry billionaire Andrej Babiš – widely considered as the most powerful Czech politician at this moment (and often painted as the next Führer) – is doing a good job as the finance minister (but so did many predecessors).

For example, the Czech government budget shows the record surplus over CZK 80 billion after August; it seems very likely to me that the whole year will end in a surplus. Obviously, I don't think that it's mostly Babiš's achievement but I don't want to discuss these things here.

Off-topic: Obama, Kerry, and their equally racist f*cked-up friends have imposed sanctions on [Czech company] Škoda JS [nuclear machinery] Pilsen, once a part of the Škoda Holding and now the main sponsor of the great ice-hockey team in my hometown, HC Škoda Pilsen (which has several North American players, a Native American 2nd-U.S-army-imitating logo, and a post-NHL owner) – because of some Russian owners. This gets rather personal. Do these megajerks in the U.S. administration also want to damage the ice-hockey team, using the fallacy by association? I prefer if you die quickly, you unAmerican Kerries.

However, it's his (and his voters') general totalitarian mindset – so perfectly compatible with the persuasive claims that he was a communist secret agent codenamed Bureš – that is so terribly troubling.

A minister (the most SJW-like minister Jiří Dienstbier Jr) and an emeritus opposition leader (Karel Schwarzenberg, an aristocrat) demand his resignation after some potentially controversial statements about the gypsies and work that he made in Northern Bohemia yesterday. This main part of the Sudetenland was mostly successfully repopulated after the 1945 expulsion of the ethnic Germans. When things are added, the Romani people represent a significant fraction of the population today and there are a few well-known gypsy ghettos in Northern Bohemia.

Note that University of Notre Dame is a private Catholic university in Indiana. I thought that this apparently wasn't enough to save the students from the extreme far left brainwashing – but Bill Z. has corrected my misunderstanding of the location.

As Kate Hardiman, a pretty student at Notre Dame, describes, three women teach a bizarre class at University of Colorado in Colorado Springs (the main campus is in Boulder, however, and I spent a month over there in 1999 at TASI) named Medical Humanities in the Digital Age. If you click at the link, you will see that the students are being indoctrinated about the climate apocalypse, alleged bad health effects of fracking, asked to quantify their carbon footprint, and they're supposed to imagine that they are looking at the evil white male imperialists from the viewpoint of the Native Americans, not to mention lots of similar things.

According to the content, it is a typical far left extremist indoctrination course. You may also notice that the name of the course doesn't describe the content well.